If You Hurt My Dog...

God help me if we ever have kids.

We took B.B. to her doggy day-care today, which we've been experimenting with lately as an outlet for some of her energy if it's raining and we can't get her to the park. They have two large rooms there with rubber(-ish) padded floors and plastic on the walls and a web cam in each room where the dogs can play so the owners can watch them while they are away. We took her there a couple times last week and watched her from home. She looked like she was having a great time just romping around with the other dogs.  We thought we'd found a nice place for B.B. to have some fun.  (That's what we literary types call "foreshadowing.")

It was supposed to rain all day today, so we took her in this morning for a half-day of play (that's all we ever do).  We dropped her off at seven o'early in the it's-still-dark-outside.  K came home, I went to work, and we watched her on the web cam.  I had a browser open and would check in every couple of minutes during and in-between meetings just to see how she was doing.  However, by about eight forty-five, we couldn't see her anymore.  

So K called them, concerned. They told her that B.B. had gotten some poop on her (yuck, I won't elaborate) and they'd taken her to get cleaned up. But the whole rest of the morning, we still didn't see her. K went to pick her up at noon, and asked about it. They (and let me pause here to say that the people who work there all seem very nice, so I'm not sure exactly what happened) said that after B.B. got cleaned up she spent the next 3 hours hiding under a table with her ears back, cowering.

Now, I know my dog. She's never done that at all, and she's been yelled at a time or two here at home.  In fits of frustration, I've even called her names even that make me really glad she doesn't understand English. And she'll drop her tail, run and hide for a second, but she'll always come out almost immediately and nuzzle up to us. At the dog park, even under the worst conditions when other much more aggressive dogs have been mean to her, she picks herself right back up and goes and licks their face to show them she's not a threat.

So what could have forced her under a table for several hours cowering? K said that the people (I want to call them kids because they all look like they're 15-20 years younger than I am, though it's probably more like 12-17 years younger) who brought B.B. out to her today were really nice, explained all of this, and seemed genuinely puzzled at her behavior. They offered some suggestions, things they'll do differently next time she's there, to try to prevent that - whatever it was - from happening again.

But I'm not sure if I ever want to take her there again. Someone - man or canine - did something to my B.B. Was it the blond-haired kid who was lackadaisical about cleaning up after the dogs? (Yeah, I was watching you on the web cam.) Was it the nice girl who took her from us this morning? Was it the other nice girl who brought her back to K at noon? Was it some unseen worker who may have been responsible for cleaning B.B. up?

I don't care who it was, but if you're reading this now, I've got a few words from you my friend. Lay a hand on my dog, and I'll lay a hand on you. You do what you did again, whatever it was, and you will feel my squirrelly wrath.  And if that's not completely, one hundred percent clear, let me rephrase in words I'm sure you will understand:  if you hurt my dog, I will fucking end you. Make no mistake.

B.B.'s Snow Day

We woke to a few inches of snow on the ground this morning, first this season. We usually get something down here just far enough south to turn most wintry weather into cold rain, from a light dusting to a single good layer, but so far this year we've escaped it. Until today.

Frankly, I was excited, looking forward to it even. Since we got B.B., I wanted to see how she would like the snow. And perhaps this is stating the should-be-obvious, but she took to it like a fish in water, or, more precisely, like a sled-dog in snow.

Here's a clip.

Quote of the Day - NSFW Edition

I have to tell this story, because it's just so freaking awesome. Yesterday, K, who can usually hold her own in the witty comeback department, suddenly raised it to a whole new level and burned me down to the minor leagues.

Let me set the stage.

I was playing with B.B. in the house. It was raining outside, so we couldn't take her out for her usual exercise, which she needs each day to stay relatively calm, and I was throwing this orange rubber ball around for her to chase, fetch, and bring back to me, something she does about 90% of the time. In order to get her worn out a little more, I started throwing it up the stairs, thinking that the "stair-master" effect would tire her out quicker. She would run up, get it, and bring it back down to me each time. Good girl.

Now, I have to explain, this isn't a little tennis ball we're talking about. No, this is a rather heavy, hefty, not-really-bouncable, hard rubber ball. B.B. has torn apart all of her other, less impressive, toy balls. So when I throw this thing around the house, I make sure to carefully avoid windows, vases, dishes, the cat, drywall, and load-bearing beams, suffice it to say.

So, anyway, up the stairs. B.B. was doing pretty well with this, until this one time I threw it, it bounced off something, and ricocheted back down as she was running up. She didn't notice at first and kept going. I caught it, and in an attempt to lob it back up before she got turned around - failed - I launched it right back up as she was swinging her face back around, and I clocked her right in the kisser. Being a Malamute (which is Eskimo for "dog with rock skull" I believe) she didn't really notice, but I felt bad anyway. I called out to her to come down and I rubbed her face and told her I was sorry. She happily dropped the ball in my hands and wanted me to throw it again.

But K heard me and asked what I'd done.

"I hit her in the face with the ball," I said.

"Oh nice," she said, but mostly laughing.

"Hey, it was an accident," I replied.

"What are you going to do next? Hit me in the face with the ball?" (You have to admit, she set herself up with that one.)

So I quickly replied, before she could retract that awesome setup: "Why? Have you taken balls to the face before?"

And just as quickly, she shot back: "Yeah, but not yours."

BURN. Damn. Ouch. That one still hurts. I was simultaneously shot down, silenced, left with no possible come-back, and just a little bit turned on at the same time. Yep. That's my K.

NaNo Wrap-Up - 51,962 Words!

Yes, I finished. Unbelievable. I hit fifty thousands words tonight, a little while ago in fact, and because I was still working on a chapter, I took it right to the end (of the chapter). As of now, I have 51,962 words. But there is still so much left that I haven't finished writing about. I feel like I've just got my characters (plural: there are quite a few others now besides my MC) fully formed and in place for all of the real action to start. Why stop now?

I took B.B. for a long walk the other day. (Bear with me. This is going somewhere.) It was Friday, and I felt the need to work off all of the food I'd eaten on Thanksgiving Day. Plus, B.B. had been stuck inside all day long on Thursday and had pretty much slept the entire day. She can do that for one day, but the next day she needs some exercise or she gets a little crazy. So I took her out on a long walk, combining two long trails that we normally take separately, and ended up walking her for about 10 miles (which at my pace took us about two and a half hours). Yeah, crazy, I know. But I'd had enough turkey and stuffing and potatoes and pie (and whatnot) to last me a while, and I needed to burn some of that off. (The pedometer in my iPod told me, after we'd finished, that I'd burnt 2,000 calories on that walk. Nice.) Anyway, that gave me plenty of time to think and toss around different ideas for my story. And let me tell you, in two and a half hours, you can come up with quite a few ideas. I find that the fresh air and the exercise really gets my creative juices flowing. Probably has something to do with more oxygen getting to my brain than usual, but whatever. It works. I'm excited about some of the things I thought up, and I hope I can finish it. K suggested I spend the next 11 months working that out before I start on a new one in November 2010. Sounds like a plan.

But I think I might take a little break first. Whoever put NaNoWriMo in the middle of a month with a major American holiday in it was crazy to begin with. (Or, possibly, not American). Trying to write while getting ready for Christmas will be even more difficult. On top of that, I've got two books on my desk that I'm dying to read: Stephen King's latest, which will probably go first because he's usually a fast read for me, and Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving's new one.

So I'll do that, take just a little time off, but hopefully not so much that I completely lose the momentum I've build up over the past 29 days, and then get back to it. Wish me luck.

Many thanks to my friend M.C. Etcher for his daily blog updating his own NaNo progress, which has helped me along through the month. There was something comforting knowing that a buddy is going through the same pain exercise as I was.

NaNo – Back At It Again

So I took a couple days off. I was ahead anyway. We had a bit to do around the house and stuff to do with the dog these past few days, plus work has been crazy busy, so haven't even had much time to sit back and think about what I want to do in the next chapter. I needed to create an entirely new setting for my MC (he gets hauled off to a mental institution, have I mentioned that?) and of course I'm creating all of this from scratch in my head. I don't know what a mental institution looks like outside what I've seen in movies and on TV. I put One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Next on the top of my Netflix queue, but I think I will wait to watch it until after November, so I don't taint my story with ideas that Ken Kesey cooked up forty-odd years ago. (Yes, of course I've already seen it, and read the book, which is great by the way, but writing about this made me want to revisit it again.)

I think if it wasn't for this deadline, looming, fifty thousand words due by the end of the month, I might have stopped here for a while, a decade perhaps, because it would have been just easier to do so than to stress over what my own version of an asylum would look like. But I sat down tonight (and after some encouragement from MC Etcher, thanks for that) and just started writing. I thought to myself, let's just describe this place. My MC wakes up in a strange place, what does he see? So I described the room, and as I did, I could see it in my mind. I added little details. There was a small desk under a window and someone had scratched some words into the top. I'll refer back to that at some point, probably will create an entire subplot to explain those words, or not, who knows. And the window cranks out vertically but only about two or three inches, so you know at some point my MC is going to need to drop something out the window barely two or three inches wide. Then he meets somebody, they have a conversation, he walks around, sees more of the place, meets more people, and the cycle has started again.

Point is, I forced myself to start writing when I really didn't want to – it's the perfectionist in me that doesn't want to start something unless I know I can do it well – and even though later, down the line, in the editing process, I might decide to throw out a good chunk of that exposition I drafted up detailing every nook and cranny of this guy's room, it helped me get this novel kick started again. Now I'm several thousand words ahead of where I was on Sunday, and I've got a score of new characters to interact with and a whole institution to explore. And boy will I.

NaNo - Chapter Two Finished

Today I hit 29,751 words. My goal was to hit 30k by the end of the weekend, but I don't think I'm going to make it. I've finished Chapter Two, which was difficult, because I had to get my character over a couple of emotional and geographical humps so he can end up in the place where he spends the rest of the novel. I suppose I could throw in forty-nine more words to hit my self-imposed mark, but no, that's okay. I struggle with the subconscious inclination to pad this story as is, and I'm not going to start doing so deliberately now. Besides, I'm well ahead of schedule. By now, mid-point in the month, I should be at 25,000 words even, so I'm a couple of days in the black. Not that I'm going to rest on those laurels, but I need to spend a little time figuring out what happens next. He's going to meet a variety of new people, my MC, and I need to sort them out in my head before I start writing about them.

The NaNoWriMo web site allows you to plug in daily word counts as you go along. I'm pretty good about updating this after I'm done for the day, although not always, but this gives me a pretty good idea of how I'm doing and how I've been doing. I'm quite pleased with myself so far. Let's see if I can do this well the rest of the month, but I feel a little pressure to finish early. Whoever decided to put this in the same month as a tryptophan-laden feast was clearly not from the U.S., and I'm afraid if I don't hit my 50,000 words by November 25, I may not finish at all.

Couple of Things

First off, I'm struggling at a point in my NaNoWriMNo novel where my protagonist has to transition from one setting to another. I wasn't sure how to pull that off. I've got him in limbo at the moment and haven't written much in the past two days. So I took B.B. for a walk tonight, put on some loud Prodigy (which is the soundtrack for this particular work), and mulled over different scenarios. Something about the fresh air, the exercise, the blood rushing to my brain in ways that it just doesn't while I'm sitting on my butt in front of the computer, I don't know, something about that just gets my creative juices whirling. I figured out not only how to get to the next phase (chapter three, in fact) but how to make this limbo stuff meaningful and memorable and useful later on, and I have some pretty good ideas how to kick off the next chapter. Thank God. I was beginning to worry that I'd be stuck here for the next 16 days.

Second, K and I picked up a copy of Dave Egger's edited Best American Nonrequired Reading (2009) today and found, inside, this ode to David Foster Wallace, a man I have expressed my sadness and adoration for already, written by (none other than) National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen, who was apparently a close friend of DFW. It's a short paean, barely five pages, and if you're browsing through a bookstore someday soon, you might pick this book up, navigate back to page 167 and give it a read. But one thing I would like to share, as Franzen puts it better than I ever could, is a brief thought on how amazingly well DFW crafted a sentence, and if you link back to my pithy farewell, you'll know what I mean when I say his writing urged me to be a better writer.

He had the most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive. Way out at word number 70 or 100 or 140 in a sentence deep into a three-page paragraph of macabre humor of fabulously reticulated self-consciousness, you could smell the ozone from the crackling precision of his sentence structure, his effortless and pitch-perfect shifting among ten different levels of high, low, middle, technical, hipster, nerdy, philosophical, vernacular, vaudevillian, hortatory, tough-guy, broken-hearted, lyrical diction.

So very true. Well put Jon.

Under the Dome (an early review, pre-read)

I'm a Stephen King fan, I'll admit it freely. For a fun read, and for my money, there are few authors that can spin a perfectly mindless yarn while being entertaining, keeping me on the edge, and also write pretty well all at the same time. (My Scottish friends out there might be pleased to note that I've recently added Ian Rankin to that list.) I like to mix up my reading: something non-fiction, then something fiction; something heavy, then something light. Keeps the palate cleansed so to speak.

Also, I've been collecting Stephen King original hardcovers for, oh, about fifteen years now, ever since a buddy of mine in college showed me his collection of Stephen King original hardcovers, and I totally got caught up in my own envy. (I mean, to a book nerd like me, that was freakin' cool.) I'm not ridiculously hard-core about it. I don't go out and find the original hardcovers of books that I've missed (although I would love an original copy of It one of these days, just because I loved that book as kid). I have most everything he's written from the early 90's on. Before that, I had paperbacks that I don't own anymore. But these days, if it comes out, I generally buy it in hardback right away.

So when I got an email from Amazon a little while ago telling me that they were selling Steve's new one for $9 (down from a cover price of $35) I pre-ordered in a hurry. It came in the mail yesterday.

Now, two things I noticed before I even read it. Three things really. Well, four.

First of all, the cover is stunning. There is a blurb on the Amazon page for this book explaining all of the graphic art and CGI that went into it, but really, outstanding.

Second, the plot. Here it is from the publisher in a nutshell:

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when -- or if -- it will go away.

Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens -- town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn't just short. It's running out.

Anything about that strike you as familiar? Say, maybe, the 2007 Simpsons Movie? (If you haven't seen it, trust me, it's similar. The town of Springfield gets encapsulated by a huge dome, although for completely comedic reasons, and of course Homer & Co. have to save the day once Marge pulls Homer's head out of his ass. Sort of like a long episode, but with a dome, over a city, that the occupants of which were under. Sound familiar?)

Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice this similarity, the blogosphere must be abuzzin', but I got to wondering what could Steve possibly be thinking? In the back of the book, he's got one of his usual Author's Notes (addressed to me, or "Constant Reader" as he likes to call me) where he tells me that he actually started this story in 1976 and put it away because it was too challenging. "I had this idea first," he's clearly saying, preemptively staving off the naysayers among us. Then he clearly admits to starting it over again back in 2007. Really Steve? In 2007? I wonder what could have possibly prompted you to tackle this subject again.

Now, I've often speculated about how it must feel to an author to find one of his (or her) ideas used elsewhere, completely innocently, no plagiarism involved. Certainly it's possible for two people to come up with the same idea independently. I expounded upon it a little during my review of Quietus a few years ago. I, myself, had that problem earlier this year. Back in the summer of '08 (way back in the dark ages) I started work on a novel about a guy who could tell if people were lying to him and how he used that gift and how it used him, etcetera. Then, this fall, the Fox Broadcasting Company premiered a TV show about a guy who can tell if people are lying. (Bugger!) Oh well. I had pretty much run into a brick wall with it anyway, but now I'm really done. Maybe ten years from now I might revisit, but at the moment it would be way too soon, too obvious a connection to pop culture. Nobody would believe that I'd thought of it all on my own, even if I did put in an Author's Note explaining that I had the idea first, all the way back in 2008.

My point? Steve, you should have let some time pass before you tried to publish this one. I realize you're getting older and want to get a few more books written before your time runs out, but maybe this one should have stayed on the shelf a few more years until the memory of The Simpsons movie has faded. Trust me, you and Matt Groenig have a lot of the same readers. And at $527 million world-wide gross, more than just a few people saw that little flick.

Third: he's done this before, written a book with an obvious pop-culture inspiration. Duma Key, his last one (that I read, anyway) was about a guy who painted things that came true. Like in Heroes, that TV show that nobody's really watching any more. I stood up for you then, Steve. I'm not doing it again.

Fourth: the length. Have you seen this book? It's freaking huge. It's the biggest King book on my shelf. I have to go back to Insomnia before I find one that's even close. We're talking something along The Stand proportions. 1072 pages. I was initially quite excited. I like it when Steve goes all epic-proportions on us. Those are usually the most fun to read. I mean, seriously, have you read The Stand? Awesome book. So yeah, I was stoked.

Until I opened the book, that is.

Did you ever have to write a ten-page report for school and you increased the font to 13-point and widened the margins to 1.5" just to get your sparse text to spill onto that 10th page? (Our teachers weren't fooled, were they?  But they couldn't say much because they hadn't specified layout metrics.) Yeah, this feels the same. The font is almost so big that I wondered if I got one of the "large print" books for people with poor eyesight. The margins are wide enough to draw very complex flip-book style animations in it and have room left for notes about the economy or anything else that comes to mind. The paper is obnoxiously thick, almost as if the publishers wanted the book to appear thicker than it really was. By comparison, David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest, has nearly the same number of pages, is about a quarter-inch thinner, and just glancing at how small the print is and how many lines he gets on a page (43 lines per page compared to Steve's 35 lines) and a font size that probably gets about 25% more words per line, I'm guessing he's got about twice as many actual words in his 1076 pages.

This is not Steve's fault, of course. The publishers can't charge $35 per book for an inch-thick volume. So they padded it with extra paper (relatively cheap) and jacked up the price. I got my copy for nine bucks, so what am I complaining about? The sucker's heavy. That's all. I'm anxious to read that thing (after November of course) but I think I might get carpal tunnel just trying to hold it up.

I've rambled on long enough. Need to get back to my own writing.  If/when I read it, I'll come back and tell you if I thought it was worth the $9. The last one was. The one before that wasn't.

NaNo Day 10 and a Bit of a Scare (not in that order)

After Sunday's Bedroom Destroying Excitement (which was so much fun in the aftermath), B.B. was a little sluggish the rest of the day, but we chalked that up to the excitement of destroying thousands of dollars of custom window treatments. (It's not every day, after all, that you can increase your personal cost of ownership by a double-digit percentage in one fell swoop.) She came home from the dog park that morning a little sluggish, too (this was pre- the destructive rampage) and for the first in recorded history she didn't eat all of the food we gave her for lunch. She ate about three-quarters of it and then just laid down. That worried us a bit, but since she likes pumpkin (and thank God the Libby's people solved whatever distribution problem they were having earlier) which is good for the digestion, it somehow has the double effect of speeding up things that are slow or slowing down things that are happening too fast, or so we've read, we gave her a little bit on top of the one-quarter food she had left to encourage her to finish. Then we left her alone while we went out to lunch, and the rest is history.

But she didn't eat all of her food at dinner either and struggled over breakfast, too. Now, that could have been because K fed her three slices of Pepperidge Farm's White Bread in the evening because our vet had once told us a story of a dog who ate some sewing needles and the owner gave him white bread which coated the needles and allowed them to pass without tearing up the dogs intestines. But I think perhaps the bread, being something totally new to her, upset her stomach a little.

In the morning she clearly wasn't feeling herself, but she did eat breakfast and K took her to the park to run around, but something was clearly wrong. They came home for lunch and B.B. only had a few bites. So K called the vet and asked what she should do. He recommended we bring B.B. in for an x-ray, better to be safe than sorry. We had to leave her there because they needed the afternoon to sedate her (and I have to confess that I don't like leaving B.B. somewhere that I am not). They found little bits of metal from the flashing around the outsides of the blinds, but the vet said it probably wasn't anything to worry about. Still, though, we worry anyway. She came home, ate the rest of her lunch as dinner, and slept a lot (she was groggy because of the sedative). The vet encouraged us to take her on short walks to encourage her to, well, you know. He said the x-rays showed that she was likely blocked up by something, but he didn't know what. So we did. We walked her several times around the neighborhood, very slowly since she was stumbling around like a drunken sailor (no offense to any sailors reading this). Mostly she just slept as we watched her.

This morning she seems back to her usual self. We got up at five, had a bit of a walk around the yard, she ate her breakfast in usual lightening-fast style that she normally does, and then she chased the cat around, who seemed curious himself to know what was going on with her and just wanted to be in the same room with us. She's lying on the floor next to me right now, watching me type, and Gus is next to me watching her.

I don't like to think about anything bad happening to anybody in my family, K, Gus, B.B. I call them "my girls" even though Gus is technically not (he doesn't mind, though). Yesterday while B.B. was at the vet, I had this feeling of increasing panic rise up in me because she was somewhere that I couldn't just reach out and assure her that everything would be all right, even if it I didn't know that for sure. I knew she was scared by herself and didn't like being without us. Takes us back, full circle, to why she did what she did to the bedroom yesterday. In her little crate (which actually has enough room for her to move around in and almost stretch out, but we can't help our negative reaction to the fact that it is basically a cage) she probably can't do much more than just sit around idle. Given the space of an entire bedroom, her own rising levels of panic probably took over. I guess I can understand that, although I will say that in an entire afternoon without her yesterday I didn't destroy anything more than a grand latte from Starbucks.

Enough of that sentimental crap

Moving on...

NaNoWriMo Day 10. I'm just over the 20,000 words mark and feeling pretty good about it. I've gotten past Chapter One, which was my introduction to the Main Character, background about him, and leading up to an integral part of his storyline that sets everything in motion. Chapter Two always was going to be a transition into the main setting and the formal story-line which would start in Chapter Three, but I needed it to be more than just a couple of paragraphs saying, "...and then he moves to a new place and meets new people." Boring.

Something that fascinates me about creative writing is the creative part. Sometimes, as I'm writing, I just let my mind wander and stumble upon things I hadn't thought of before. For instance, I introduced a character who my main character needed to interact with during this Chapter Two transition, and in the course of writing I realized this new character was more interesting than I'd thought. The more I wrote about him (and he was never supposed to be in more than a couple pages) I found out that he could be useful. I think I'll bring him back later when the plot needs someone like him, which it will. The reader, at that point, will think, "Yeah, I remember that guy" because he got the chance to do some interesting things in Chapter Two that will impact the Main Character going forward.

So that's the interesting part, discovering little gems that you didn't know about. (Not precious gems like diamonds or rubies, because we're not writing at that caliber; more like feldspar or quartz.) You stumble upon them as you get your character from Point A to Point B. There are stops along the way and sometimes you run into interesting people there.

My guy (which is what I'll the MC) had to stop by a hospital in Chapter One and look for someone, just a brief visit but it was necessary to the plot. I had to write in someone at the front desk who he could talk to. So I did. I knew I was going to have to, but I didn't think much of it before I got to that particular scene. So I patterned this woman slightly after a character in a TV show that K and I watch, Nurse Jackie, if you've ever seen it, starring Edie Falco with a great little butch hairstyle who has a well intentioned, somewhat buffoon-ish, always sweet, nursing student assistant named Zooey working for her who became the inspiration for the nurse at the front desk. She didn't have to do much more than say a couple lines and be nice to my guy, but because of the image I have in my head, I feel like she could come back and play a much larger role if I needed her to. She probably won't. He's moving on. But that's what I'm talking about. Little gems. One of the things I like about writing.

Tomorrow I'll bore you with my thoughts on first-person vs. third-person narrative, but I warned you a couple days ago to ignore my rambling. If you're still reading at this point, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Minor Setback

We left B.B. alone for the first time today outside of her crate. We'd gone out for lunch, only for about an hour and a half, and left her closed up in our bedroom. We thought that would give her some room to stretch. She'd just come back from a couple hours at the dog park and she was tired. We figured she'd just sleep while we were gone.

Wrong.

I'll leave this up as long as I can. YouTube didn't like my background music, but I thought it was perfect.

B.B. Did a Bad Bad Thing @ Yahoo! Video